Svetlana's Reads and Views

Title of the book: the minds MIRROR; risk and reward in the age of AI Author: Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone Publisher: w.w. Norton  Publishing Date: 2024 ISBN: 978-1-324-07932-3 Summary: An exciting introduction to the true potential of AI from the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As advances in artificial intelligence spark fear and confusion, The Mind’s Mirror argues for AI as a force with enormous positive potential for human life—and also major risks with unknown consequences. Computer scientist and AI researcher Daniela Rus offers an expert perspective as a leader in the field who has lived through many technological hype cycles. Rus and science writer Gregory Mone explore what we, as individuals and as a society, must do to mitigate dangerous outcomes and ensure a positive impact for as many people as possible. The result is an accessible and lively exploration of AI’s inner workings, limitations, dangers, and fantastic pos...

Name of Book: The physics of sorrow  Author: Georgi Gospodinov trans Angela Rodel ISBN: 978-1-324-09489-0 Publisher: Liveright  Type of book: history, Bulgaria, maze, 1930s to 2000s, travel, deaths, Theseus and the minotaur myth, secrets, generational trauma, Soviet Union  Year it was published: 2024 (original 2011)  Summary: The “quirky [and] compulsively readable” (New York Times) precursor to the 2023 International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter. Written with a “formal playfulness [that] suggests Kundera with A.D.D.” (illage Voice), Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow became an underground cult classic upon its 2012 release. In a radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi constructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogs curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbule...

Title of the book: Germany in the world; a global history 1500-2000 Author: David Blackbourn  Publisher: Live right  Publishing Date: 2023  ISBN: 978-1-63149-183-2 Summary: Brilliantly conceived and majestically written, this monumental work of European history recasts the five-hundred-year history of Germany. With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification―and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany’s evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history―the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime―are transformed, while others are unearthed and explo...

  Name of Book: Becoming the TWILIGHT EMPRESS  Author: Faith L Justice  ISBN: 9780917053306 Publisher: Raggedy moon books  Part of a Series: Theodosian Women prequel Type of book: Roman Empire, 408-410 ME, Placidia, family, control, rule, run away, diplomacy, wars, sieges, negotiations  Year it was published: 2024  Summary: In a tumultuous time of violence, betrayal, and ruthless evil, can one charismatic young woman survive the bloodshed? Ravenna, A.D. 408. Placidia is watching her family fall apart. When her emperor brother accuses their powerful foster father of treason, the naive imperial princess tries to reason with her sibling to no avail. And after her foster father is lured out of sanctuary and brutally executed, she flees the toxic court to avoid a forced marriage… but to dubious safety. Braving increasing peril on her journey to Rome, Placidia barely survives impassable swamps, imperial assassins, and bands of barbarians. When the Goths besiege R...

  Title of the book: There is happiness Author: Brad Watson Publisher: W.W. Norton Publishing Date: 2024  ISBN: 978-1-324-07642-1 Summary: A posthumous collection of beloved and never-before-read stories from a titan of contemporary Southern fiction. Darkly comedic, lyrically mighty, and unabashedly vulnerable, There Is Happiness brings together Brad Watson’s most celebrated pieces alongside new, unpublished works. Watson’s characters―often boys and brothers, fathers and sons―are shaped by oddities of nature, while nature itself communicates loudly. In these pages, dogs most certainly have their day, a one-eyed woman swims the breaststroke, and Dolly Parton holds the key to a convict’s salvation. Spouses grow apart while bitter landlords bang on the ceiling to quiet the creaking bedframe upstairs. Grotesque twins exercise in tandem, and two men drink to forget their dead wives (though “dead” is a relative term). Roller-coastering from the mournful to the hilarious (sometimes ...

  Name of Book: Her side of the story  Author: Alba de Cespedes ( trans Jill Foulston)  ISBN: 9781662601439 Publisher: Astra House  Type of book: Italy, 1930s-1946, WWII, daily life, love, coming of age, marriage, expectations, translations, women, broken dreams   Year it was published: 2023 (1959)  Summary: From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.” As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.” Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father's relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit ...

   Title of the book: Meet the neighbors; Animal minds and life in a more-than-human world  Author: Brandon Keim  Publisher: W.W Norton  Publishing Date: 2024 ISBN: 978-1-324-00708-1 Summary: What does the science of animal intelligence mean for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us? Honeybees deliberate democratically. Rats reflect on the past. Snakes have friends. In recent decades, our understanding of animal cognition has exploded, making it indisputably clear that the cities and landscapes around us are filled with thinking, feeling individuals besides ourselves. But the way we relate to wild animals has yet to catch up. In  Meet the Neighbors , acclaimed science journalist Brandon Keim asks: what would it mean to take the minds of other animals seriously? In this wide-ranging, wonder-filled exploration of animals’ inner lives, Keim takes us into courtrooms and wildlife hospitals, under backyard decks and into deserts, to me...

   Title of the book: Rivsrmouth; a chronicle of language, faith, and migration  Author: Alejandra Oliva  Publisher: Astra house Publishing Date: 2023 ISBN: 978-1-6626-0169-9 Summary: The Undocumented Americans meets Tell Me How It Ends in this chronicle about translation, storytelling, and borders as understood through the United States' “immigration crisis.” In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way. Tracing her family’s long and fluid relationship to the border, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, and having worked on asylum cases since 2016, she knows all too well the gravity of taking someone's trauma and delivering it to the warped demands of the American immigration system. In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physica...

  Name of Book: Villa E Author: Jane Alison ISBN: 978-1-324-09505-7 Publisher: Live right  Type of book: 1965, memories, reminisces, France, creativity, taking credit for something that doesn't belong to you, feud, struggles of elderly, leaving legacy  Year it was published: 2024  Summary: From the author of Meander, Spiral, Explode , an astounding novel inspired by the collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Along the glittering coast of southern France, a white villa sits atop an earthen terrace―a site of artistic genius, now subject to bitter dispute. Eileen, a new architect known for her elegant chair designs, poured the concrete herself; she built it as a haven for her and her lover, and called it E-1027. When the hulking Le G, a founder of modernist architecture, laid eyes on the house in 1929, he could see his influence in the sleek lines―and he would not be outdone. Impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the clean, white...

   Title of the book: Raiders, Rulers and Traders; the horse and the rise of empires  Author: David Chaffetz Publisher: W.W. Norton  Publishing Date: 2024  ISBN: 978-1-324-05146-6 Summary: A captivating history of civilization that reveals the central role of the horse in culture, commerce, and conquest. No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a small, shy animal, hunted for food. Over time, the domestication of horses, followed by the advent of riding, powered mighty Persian, Mongol, Mughal. For more than two millennia, from Iran and Afghanistan to China, India, and, later, Russia, the deep and ancient bond between humans and their horses connected a vast continent, forged trade routes, linked cultures, and fueled war machines. Scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of the steppe raiders, rulers, and traders who amassed power and wealth on horseback from the Bronze Age through the twentiet...

  Name of Book: A Feather So Black  Author: Lyra Selena  ISBN: 9780316564960 Publisher: Orbit Part of a Series: The Fair Folk  Type of book: Fantasy, brooding hero, Irish MYTHOLOGY based, fae folk, mysteries, secret world, love triangle, a whole year  Year it was published: 2024  Summary: Set in a world of perilous magic and moonlit forests, this seductive romantic fantasy tells the story of a defiant changeling, her cursed sister, and the dangerous fae lord she must defeat to save her family. In a kingdom where magic has been lost, Fia is a rare changeling, left behind by the wicked Fair Folk when they stole the High Queen's daughter and retreated behind the locked gates of Tír na nÓg. Most despise Fia's fae blood. But the queen raises her as a daughter and trains her to be a spy. Meanwhile, the real princess Eala is bound to Tír na nÓg, cursed to become a swan by day and only returning to her true form at night. When a hidden gate to the realm is discove...